Some questions, and looking for suggestions on which mods I should use now.

I've decided to start a new single-player survival game and re-evaluate which mods to use, but I also have some questions.

Note: I play Minecraft to relax, not to challenge my skills, so I generally stay in peaceful mode and single-player. Also, I have a 4k screen, so I'd prefer not to have to settle for 16x textures. I have been using 128x textures (from bdcraft.net), since 256x or 512x tends to run out of memory, even though I have 16 gigabytes of physical ram (and I've tried giving Java up to 12GB for running Minecraft). I've gotten 256x textures to work when I play with no mods (including in version 1.8).

Questions:
1. Can someone suggest a layout for setting up IC2 machines automated via AE2 crafting cpu(s)? (including some ME controllers, and some room for ME storage drive(s) and expanding other things as needed)
2. Is there a mod (or combination of mods) that would allow me to automatically tap rubber trees (in a farm I'd make either manually or automatically of just rubber trees with leaves removed) for the sticky resin and put it in a nearby chest of some sort, wait for the tap hole to refill before tapping it again, and stop when the chest is full?
3. Which matter conversion/exchange mod is best? AetherCraft, Balanced Exchange, Equivalent Exchange 3, or some other similar mod? Please provide reasons, and if there's a feature comparison table already posted somewhere, I'd like to look at it. (or are they all so overpowered that I shouldn't use any of them?)
4. If I don't use some other mod's way of obtaining iridium ore, am I better off making more via mass fabricator and replicator once I find some in a chest (last I checked, iridium ore requires 120 mB of the liquid UU-matter), or looking for more chests with it?
5. Which minimap mod is best, and why? A comparison table for them would be good too.

I was going to list my feelings on all the mods listed at http://modlist.mcf.li/version/1.7.10, aside from ones that were server-side only, dependencies for other mods that didn't do much on their own, or addons to mods I don't plan to use, but that would have put me way over the 10k character limit for forum posts here.

In general, I like mods that reduce the risk of my character dying or having my stored items and machines I've set up destroyed, but I don't like mods that make it trivial to obtain materials that are normally limited (I don't mind automating the gathering of renewable materials like wood from giant spruce trees or sticky resin from IC2 rubber trees, though). I'm okay with semi-automatic crafting, but I think it's more fun to do the mining myself than to use some sort of automatic miner. Also, I'm usually not interested in mods that add decorative blocks that don't have other uses.

Here are the mods I'm planning to use so far (with 1.7.10, at least until such time as most of them have 1.8 versions):
Advanced Genetics
Applied Energistics
Aquaculture
Autofish
BedrockLayer
Compact Solars
ChickenShed
Enchanting Plus
Fortune Ores
IndustrialCraft 2 Experimental
Iridium Mod
Malisis Doors
MAtmos
Millenaire
Minecraft Loader
Mouse Tweaks
NEI Addons
NEI Plugins
Nether Ores
New Dawn
New Dungeons
Not Enough Items
Optifine
Peaceful Plus
Ruins
Shaders Mod
Squeedometer
Too Much Loot
Too Much Rain
Treecapitator
Twilight Forest
Waila
Waila Harvestability
Waving Plants (shader pack)
Wawla
WorldStateCheckpoints

Please let me know if you can answer any of my questions, or if you want to suggest a mod to remove from or add to the list above, and we can discuss, thanks.

I am somewhat against using GregTech in my single-player game. Here are the pros and cons I've noticed so far (admittedly I haven't tried it much or researched it deeply):
Pros:
* many of the changes to recipes for IC2 machines make sense, like needing diamonds to make a macerator (macerating diamond and obsidian with just flint is a bit weird), or a ruby to make a mining laser.
* adds more worldgen ores, including iridium, and presumably some of the machines are built with the additional metal types.
Cons:
* as far as I can tell, there's no official/dedicated wiki for GregTech itself, only a 2090-page (and counting) IC2 forum post about it and some incomplete FTB wikis (http://wiki.feed-the-beast.com/GregTech and http://ftbwiki.org/GregTech).
* it tweaks vanilla minecraft items and recipes, like much lower durability for wooden and stone pickaxes (and presumably for other tools as well) and only 2 planks per wood, 2 sticks per 2 planks (though I don't find a mention of these tweaks in the description or wiki summaries). I feel like that's going too far.

I considered Forestry, but the wiki doesn't have a "first steps" page like some of the other big mods do, and the videos I found there seemed like they were focusing on new features for version 2.0, rather than core functionality. As far as Railcraft, I'm not sure I like the idea of simple rails becoming more complicated to build (though I'm okay with rails that have extra functionality being complicated). Also, I haven't seen much in the way of features from them that would interest me.

I hadn't been interested enough in IC2 crops to notice the existence of stickreed, but it looks like a good way to get sticky resin. However, the Crop Harvestor is from GregTech as far as I can tell (although possibly it has been migrated to IC2, and the wikis haven't been updated yet).

Quote from _Tim_

Also with Forestry you can do the whole rubber farm.

With stickreed or by harvesting rubber trees and letting me put the rubber wood in an extractor?

Quote from _Tim_

I've only known and use Rei's Minimap, pretty straight forward and can easily mark locations. What more do you need!

I've tried 3 minimap mods, but it's hard to decide which one I should use: MapWriter allows panning the map when I open it to fullscreen mode, but has no radar (also, mapping underground has to be toggled manually, and only works in areas where there's light, so if I use some form of night vision, it doesn't help). Rei's minimap has radar, but uses color coding for different mob types, which is a problem for me since I'm partially colorblind. VoxelMap (previously known as Zan's minimap) shows icons for different mob types, and can toggle them individually, but it's often hard to tell how close I am to the layer a mob is on.

Quote from _Tim_

Though about Extra Utilities? It adds some nice Peaceful mode items.

Extra Utilities seemed like a hodgepodge of different ideas mashed together into one mod, so I was hesitant to use it. Which items are you referring to, and is there a strong reason for me to use them instead of Peaceful Plus?

Quote from SpwnX

The majority of nerfs can be disabled, including that wood one.

That may take me some time to find them in the config. On the other hand, I suppose looking through the other items in the config might help me get a bit of a feel for what GregTech does.
Edit: found the configs for the two nerfs I was concerned about, though I had to pull Minecraft Loader, since it's not compatible with GregTech (no idea why).

Quote from SpwnX

GregTech crop harvestor does not exist anymore since IC2 implemented its own.

Is there any documentation on the IC2 version of the crop harvestor?

Quote from CubeWrench202

If you wanna a ee2 but updated i need to show you this awesome mod,it is ProjectE,made by Moze_Intel - which is very cool guy - it has everything that EE2 had...however it has different textures,but if you wanna use EE2 textures,NostalgicHero (Chocohead) made a resourcepack.
ProjectE downloads : https://www.dropbox.com/sh/0re…AAD9pmU4zOSQDSVgjVCtB5IJa
ProjectE github : https://github.com/MozeIntel/ProjectE
EE2 textures for ProjectE : [Addon][1.7.10][Open-Beta] GregTech-Addon: Sorry, but Clippy cannot help you with this Mod. You gotta do the research about Features yourself. (dont ask why this is in the Gregtech thread)
---------------------------------------------
(I don't speak english,expect mistakes).

Um, you know EE3 is out, right? According to the downloads list, it has been available for 1.7.10 since at least the end of June 2014. Why should I use an alpha-status port of EE2 instead? I'm more interested in how it compares to competing mods like AetherCraft and Balanced Exchange.

Quote from SpwnX

Minecraft Loader? I may suggest you use MultiMC. It is awesome to deal with mods, settings, configs, everything as you can have separate instances for every custom modpack of yours and it has a very user friendly interface.

I guess I forgot to mention it, but I'm already using MultiMC. Minecraft Loader was a mod to show a progress bar and more detail of what Minecraft is doing as it loads. It took me some time to track down the incompatibility between it and GregTech as the culprit, because the stack trace in the crash log was listing several classes starting with "mapwriter" as the beginning of the package name, even though I didn't have the MapWriter mod installed.

Quote from SpwnX

No, but its not complicated. Give it power, it will harvest all crops around it in a 5 radius (11x11). Use ejector upgrade to dump the produce in a chest/pipe/whatever. Give it a cropnalyzer in the ghost slot and it will only harvest crops when they are fully matured (stickreed for example can be early harvested for reed, not yielding any sticky resin).

That sounds more powerful than the old GregTech crop harvestor, which from what I could find only harvested one block in front of itself, although it didn't need any item added to make it wait for crops to fully mature.

Quote from xbony2

Nuclear Control? :p I hear that's a great mod.

I've looked at Nuclear Control 2, and it seems to me that any reactor design unstable enough to need it would output less average EU/t compared to good Mark I designs once I include cooldown time in the calculation, and having cooldown times part way through a reactor cycle would slow down obtaining plutonium for RTG fuel.

I've looked at the forum post for EE3, and it says "EMC has not been implemented yet in EE3, look for it in the future" - I was under the impression that EMC was the main point of Equivalent Exchange, so I'm confused it was released without that. Scratch EE3, I guess. Now it's between Project-E, Equivalent Exchange Reborn, AetherCraft, and Balanced Exchange (or deciding not to use any of them). I haven't used any mods like these before, so could you please provide some brief explanations of why you're interested in those particular features? Thanks.

Also note I pulled Iridium Mod, because as I understand it, GregTech does its own worldgen iridium ore blocks (making Iridium Mod redundant), and I watched an old direwolf20 spotlight on Forestry, which seemed to say that it was a BuildCraft addon (I guess it became a standalone mod later), so I went ahead and downloaded BuildCraft.

I'm a little hesitant about Galacticraft - wouldn't I have to carefully watch my oxygen (and power) supply while in rockets or on other planets to avoid dying? I'll watch the videos that are posted on the official site when I have a chance, though.

I've looked at parts of the videos, and I see the HUD you speak of (until I'd watched the videos, I was sort of expecting it to be somewhat like the IC2 scuba helmet that uses up compressed air cells, and I'd only see how many I had left if I viewed my inventory or had them in my hotbar), but one thing I'm having trouble determining from the videos or wiki: how long do the different sizes of oxygen tanks actually last? If two heavy oxygen tanks only last 10 minutes or less real-time, I think that would be too nerve-wracking for me.